


No One's Here to Sleep

by fanfic_nonnie



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Aftermath, Angst, Baby Lin, Baby Suyin, Bad Parenting, Family, Friendship, Gen, Moments of fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-14 19:39:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5755750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fanfic_nonnie/pseuds/fanfic_nonnie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It shouldn’t have been that hard to sleep. No one else had slept in her bed for a long time, her daughters learning early on that Toph was not naturally affectionate, not the way Katara and Aang were, full of hugs and kisses and eyes full of love. Toph was blind. She didn’t know how to make her eyes soft. She showed affection with a punch to the shoulder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No One's Here to Sleep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Wavesinger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Wavesinger/gifts).



When Lin was still small and startled by a storm raging outside, the last thing Toph expected was a tiny human boulder launching into her bed and curling up against her side with a whimper.

It was nearly midnight, Toph had spent far too many hours on the beat while Katara let Lin play with her own children, and Toph was absolutely exhausted.

But this was also her daughter. She’d experienced enough rejection at the hands of her own parents and had promised herself she wouldn’t do the same to Lin.

“Don’t steal all the covers,” she ordered grumpily and gently rearranged Lin so they were both comfortable.

Lin just tightened her grip, and they both went back to sleep.

* * *

“Mama, you’re messing up my hair!” Lin’s hands flew up to the top of her head in protest.

“That’s because you won’t hold still,” Toph answered crisply, and finally bent earth around Lin’s feet in pure frustration.

“Mama!”

“I can’t see, Lin. I need you to hold still.” It wasn’t like Toph could bend hair the way she did earth.

Lin huffed, crossing her arms if Toph wasn’t mistaken, but held still while Toph pulled her daughter’s hair back and pinned it.

“Better.” She released the floor and smoothed it back out.

Lin stomped off to the mirror and grumbled under her breath. If she was anything like Toph, she’d probably redo her hair later, but at least Toph could safely let Lin go out in public.

* * *

When Katara had far too much to do tracking down her own children and Lin disappeared, she regularly dispatched Aang to locate the little earthbender because, like Toph, Lin could and did vanish into or behind rock. Conveniently, she’d married someone who could earthbend as well.

“I think Kya was teasing her,” Katara told him and proceeded to sit down to deal with her daughter and Tenzin, the other object of the teasing.

Aang wisely left her to it and went to track down Lin. He found her behind a chair in a back corner where the other kids wouldn’t have thought to look.

She looked up at him with a sullen, stubborn expression much like her mother’s at that age, then looked back down at her feet, arms still crossed.

Aang sat down beside her and leaned against the wall. “I almost thought I’d find you in a hole or a cave,” he teased. He knew she didn’t mind being teased about her strengths.

But Lin just scowled more fiercely.

“Lin?”

 _“Mama_ doesn’t think I’m any good at earthbending.”

Aang was sure his surprise must have shown up on his face. Toph was shameless about bragging on Lin. “Your mother’s very proud of you.”

Lin just shot him a disbelieving look. “I do everything wrong! Or not hard enough. Or too slow. And she makes me do it over and over and over again because I don’t get it right.”

“Lin.” Aang hesitated a moment on the words, then found them under her skeptical gaze. “Your mother taught _me_ earthbending. It’s just how she is.”

He had always had to work very hard to get even the occasional nod of approval, but it had always seemed worth it.

“Why can’t you teach me earthbending, Uncle Aang?” Lin stared up at him with wide, pleading eyes.

Aang couldn’t imagine a worse bottle of trouble to open. “Let’s go see if Kya’s ready to play nice.”

Lin sighed but didn’t protest when he helped her up and walked her back to Katara and the kids.

* * *

By the time Suyin came along, Lin had figured out how to shut other people up with bending and made it clear that teasing Suyin was off limits. Toph wanted her to pick up metal bending too, not just earthbending. Lin may not have enjoyed Toph’s teaching methods, but she was as intent on learning as Toph was on teaching.

By the time Suyin was big enough to get in trouble or disagreements, Lin was there to take care of her.

“Watch your sister.” Toph offered one of her rare kisses on the top of Lin’s head and headed to the station.

“Some day, I’m going to go with her,” Lin announced to Su.

Suyin didn’t really notice. She was too busy digging around in their stores for a piece of fruit.

“No, Su!” Lin tried to take back the apples from sticky fingers and just got a rock in her face for her pains.

She scowled at her giggling little sister.

And of course, their _mother_ didn’t have anything to say about it when she got home besides, “Earthbending already? That’s my little badgermole.”

“But Mother!”

Toph pulled Lin close enough to feel along her face for a bruise. “You’ll be all right.”

Lin stared at her for a long moment, unsurprised by the lack of sympathy, for all her fingers were gentle against Lin’s cheek. It struck her so close to those unseeing eyes that despite how hard it was to get anything past Toph, it was not impossible. If she didn’t say anything about her injuries, her mother wouldn’t even notice she had them.

* * *

The pattern held through the years, Suyin managing to get away with almost anything she wanted because she reminded their mother of herself at that age.

“I just want you to be happy,” Toph said easily. She didn’t kiss Lin or touch her. It wasn’t really her way. She just smiled a little as though that were quite enough. “I turned out okay.”

“She could get hurt, Mother.” Lin drew her brows together in worry, tried again to emphasize that rule breaking had consequences, something only becoming clearer and clearer in her training as a new member of the police force. “She needs to learn that there are limits.”

“There are limits?” Toph said sharply. She hmphed and bent her metal cables into place. “They told me that too.”

* * *

School was a disaster. Suyin’s favorite thing to do about school was to not be there, and her ideas of where to run off to were typically dangerous parts of town. Lin was furious the first time she dragged Su in after catching her hanging around a shady area when following up on a potential mugging.

Not that Toph was really much happier when she came home to find out about it. Katara had come back for a visit and heard the entire report delivered in Lin’s righteous fury while Suyin sulked in her room.

Toph sighed heavily. “Is she all right?”

“This time,” Lin said. “Because I found her before someone else did.”

This was the kind of thing Toph trained them for, to be able to defend themselves, but the last thing she wanted was either of them in harm’s way unless they’d signed up for it, like Lin becoming a cop, not because they didn’t know any better.

“I’ll talk to her.”

“Aren’t you going to punish her? At least like you do when we’re training.”

“The way I remember it,” Toph answered, “you didn’t much like my consequences in training.”

Lin made a frustrated sound and stomped away.

Toph could practically feel Katara radiating with a need to say something, so she finally let herself sit down and sent a strained smile in Katara’s direction. “Something more to add?”

“You can’t just let them do whatever they want,” Katara said in that gentle way she had when she was deliberately trying to persuade. “Lin’s trying to provide some sort of boundaries for Su, and it’s hurting both of them.”

There was an implied criticism there, that Lin was being more of a mother than Toph was. It made Toph bristle and respond more cuttingly than she might have otherwise. “And your husband’s neglecting Kya and Bumi altogether.”

Katara physically stepped back at that, the movement echoing through the earth. “At least there’s another parent to take up the slack.”

Real anger boiled up at that, a sense of betrayal that she would blame Toph for being a single mother with a job, like it had been her choice to raise her girls alone. “Get out,” she ordered.

Katara stayed one long moment, taking a deep breath, and deciding whether to say anymore. Then she whirled on her heel and went out the door, leaving Toph to the mess that her family was becoming.

Toph _was_ the mother. She couldn’t give in to the weariness this all gave her or let it go. She made herself get up and go into Su’s room, feeling out along the earth to find her daughter sitting up stiffly in the bed.

“I didn’t do anything wrong, Mom!” Su started protesting almost before Toph stepped inside the threshold.

“Except skipping school.”

“School’s boring! Just like Lin.”

Toph could hear herself in the complaint, her own impatience with waiting and rules and never being allowed out of her parents’ loving cage for her. “Your sister was worried about you.”

“I can take care of myself.”

Toph sighed and sat next to her daughter on the bed. “Yes, but part of taking care of yourself is making sure you’re safe, you go dangerous places with other people watching your back and knowing where you are.” She reached out and touched Su’s shoulder. “Your sister was looking out for you.”

She felt Su’s resolve weaken, then her shoulders drop. “I know.”

* * *

There weren’t any consequences, not that Lin could tell, and it was only a matter of time before Suyin got in too much trouble for things to go on, but she’d never expected Toph to choose Su over the right thing and tear up that police report and wipe out Lin’s attempts at corraling her sister. Again.

It ate their mother up inside with Suyin gone, living with their grandparents who still only got along at a distance from Toph. Lin watched Toph become hesitant as Chief of Police and finally step down. It made her furious with Suyin for never learning and her mother too for never teaching.

* * *

Lin ignored the tight squeezing inside her chest as she looked around her room, the house. She could feel her mother’s certain tread through the kitchen. The impressions Toph made in the earth were even greater than Suyin’s heedless bending walk.

Suyin.

Lin set her jaw and went out to say goodbye.

Toph had sat down at the table and, to a stranger, seemed to be staring out the window at the back of the house. Lin knew better, but she did wonder what had captured her mother’s attention elsewhere. 

“I’m leaving, Mother.”

Toph didn’t look at her, didn’t even seem to react for a long time. Finally, there was a faint huffing sigh. “If that’s what makes you happy.”

“Do you even care that I’m going?” Lin demanded abruptly. Do you even care about _me?_

She turned, anger radiating through her own walk through the front room and out the door. She didn’t even bother using her hand to slam the door.

* * *

Toph stared unseeing anywhere but in Lin’s direction. She didn’t want Lin to see the wetness on her face she couldn’t prevent. She didn’t want to feel anything at all.

* * *

She had a guest.

Toph moved through the house on bare feet, feeling the earth around her home: the bare floors, no little feet running across the surface, leaving their own rippling quakes as they bent with barely a thought; the empty walls in Lin’s room, all her little practical things gone, including the metal mirror that used to shimmer at the edge of Toph’s consciousness; the hollow space where Suyin used to pretend to sleep late at night, her earth and metal bending giving away the trick to a mother who always, always saw it.

So this was what it was like to be all alone without family. Again.

On the other side of that door, Toph could feel the way Katara had always stood against the earth. She opened the door, heard the soft catch of familiar breath, familiar swish of water against Katara’s side mingling with the faint rustle of Water Tribe cloth.

“Toph.” There was such sorrow and understanding and empathy in that voice, then a step forward against the earth, warm arms reaching around Toph’s shoulders.

Toph never did show all her emotions, but this was Katara. She’d told Katara once upon a time how much she missed her parents, she’d told Katara how afraid she was to be a new mother by herself, and she’d seen Katara’s darkest moments too. She accepted the hug, she held on tightly and let silent tears slide down her cheeks, damp between her face and Katara’s shoulder.

There really wasn’t much to say.

* * *

It shouldn’t have been that hard to sleep. No one else had slept in her bed for a long time, her daughters learning early on that Toph was not naturally affectionate, not the way Katara and Aang were, full of hugs and kisses and eyes full of love. Toph was blind. She didn’t know how to make her eyes soft. She showed affection with a punch to the shoulder.

Her bed was empty. Her house was empty.

She got up and ‘looked’ around her. She wasn’t even Chief of Police anywhere. There was nothing left for her here, nothing but shadows of the young woman she’d been when she founded the force and made it into what it was today. She’d cast that aside for the sake of her daughter, and neither girl would even talk to her anymore. What did she have left?

She wanted to punch through a wall, and she could, so she didn’t. She packed her things in a pack no bigger than the one she’d taken when she’d run away from home to chase the Avatar and be who she really was.

* * *

Katara and Aang both woke up to the knocking. Probably because it wasn’t just knocking. This was Toph and she’d practically shaken the ground beneath their house to let them know it was her.

Aang groaned. Katara didn’t bother complaining, just sighed and crawled out from the under covers to let their friend inside.

Gone was all the metal Toph had incorporated into her favorite outfit. Gone was the blank pain that had settled in on her face the last time Katara saw her, replaced by a grim look of determination and the cream and green colors she’d worn as a Rumbler.

“Toph.”

“I’m leaving Republic City,” she said.

Aang wrapped an arm around Katara’s waist. “When? You’ll write, right?”

That drew a smile and a punch to Aang’s shoulder. “Blind, remember. I’ll keep in touch.” She sobered. “I need to go... find myself, I guess.” She directed this at Katara.

Echoes of a conversation in their childhood resonated between them. _’I’m not looking for approval. I know who I am.’_

Katara wrapped Toph up in a hug with surprisingly little resistance. “Good luck, Toph.”

Toph pulled away with one last smile and turned out into the night. She raised her arms and did something she hadn’t done in a long time.

Earth buckled, rose up beneath her feet in a tidal wave of stone and earth for her to ride, and she ran.


End file.
